Gold to $8,500 After a Brutal Pullback?

Craig (00:33.4)
Hello again from Sprott Money. Sprottmoney.com. We have reached the end of the second quarter, the first half of a very eventful 2026. And I don't know about you, but I'm ready to turn the page to July. So it is time for your precious metal projections, a call we usually have here at the first of every month with our friend Chris from Eulen. I'm your host, Craig Hemke, but it's always welcome to visit with Chris. So let's do it again. Chris, good to see you.

Chris Vermeulen (01:03.411)
Hey Craig. Always a pleasure. Yeah, good to see you.

Craig (01:06.448)
as we record this, it's actually still the second quarter. It's about midday on Tuesday the 30th, but with Canada Day holiday coming up on Wednesday, we thought, well, we better bang this out today and see how we look here at the end of what has been an eventful first quarter. we'll see. Hopefully, things will turn around in the second half. I will just use the old adage that we used to use when I was a stockbroker all those decades ago. If you believe in your thesis, if you think

And where a certain company is going and it goes down in the short term. Don't be sore, buy more. And that's kind of a little bit what we're dealing with now. Please stop by SprottMoney, SprottMoney.com. They've got great deals just now. I was on the SprottMoney.com homepage. I saw random year gold sovereigns for about $40 over spot. There's a deal tab right up there on the top of that nav bar that Chris is showing you. Go there all the time, always great deals.

Not only on purchasing precious metal, but storing precious metal too. You gotta store it someplace safe and reliable. And obviously, Sprott Money, that one of the most trusted names you're gonna find out there. So please visit sprottmoney.com and thank them for all this content. It's gonna be another busy month. But we'll start here with the precious metal projections. Very interesting month of June, Chris, that was driven by some, I don't know if we'll call it fundamental factors or not, but

I mean I sat there and watched Walsh expecting him to be more dovish than what the market was thinking, and he actually came in more hawkish. And that was quick to trim about 10% off of gold. And geez Louise, maybe almost almost 20% off of silver in a week. We're now banging around trying to find a base. Let's start with gold. what do you see, my friend?

Chris Vermeulen (03:01.993)
Yeah, well, when we take a take a look at the precious metals charts here, gold. I mean, it is trying to hold on to this kind of low, this little congestion area where we had a lot of volatility traded through here late last year. And then we saw a market f have a huge washout low, a big high volume low and a bounce. It's found that level again, it's bounced, and now it is just clinging on, hoping it it can hold this level. But the overall trend right now is is getting a little bit mixed here. We got the longer term trend still.

More or less holding up. The shorter term trends are pointing to lower pricing, meaning it's going to want to naturally follow that trend. A trend is more likely to continue. And so it is still pointing to a little bit of a precipitous fall here. This is this is a high momentum move. And based on this chart, it is showing that we could see gold slip 3800, 3600. It might happen very quick. I do feel like we could see a little bit of some type of news.

To come out that could create a bit of a slide here. I think it would probably spark some short term margin calls and create something like this where we have a huge lower wick and then a sharp rebound. We've seen it happen a few times. So I'm actually pretty interested to see when this is going to happen. This chart is pointing to like in the next week or two, we could see gold slip right to 3,600, and it'll be a very short term, a very short lived moment. I was telling this to subscribers yesterday saying,

You need to be ready because at any point I think we could see some event and gold has some crazy spike washout low and then quickly rebounds, and it might be a very significant low on the chart. When we look at the chart using Fibonacci theory, it's pointing to about 3,600. This is telling us, based on the initial sell-off and the strength of the bounce, it's telling us we should find some type of short-term support at the 618, which is the golden ratio. This is a level where

Just things in the universe tend to find support or resistance temporarily. And if it does have a bounce there, we almost always see the asset class move to the 100% measured move down here. So I'm really interested to see and waiting to pull the trigger to pick up a bunch of physical metals down at this level and potentially start to see it build a base after that. The the big question after that, Craig, is like, you know, how big of a base is this going to take? Like, could it take?

Chris Vermeulen (05:22.293)
Three months, six months, you know, before it starts to move higher and start to rally. That's the big question. But I I'm gutting for and looking to buy metals or gold specifically at thirty six hundred.

Craig (05:34.83)
Chris, I we use those Fibonacci levels on the way up quite effectively. Yeah, I remember you talking about you once you get through that six one eight, you almost always go to the hundred level. So I certainly see why it would work on the downside. What can you nail down that six one eight level for what what that would be for people to watch?

Chris Vermeulen (05:40.031)
Mm.

Chris Vermeulen (05:55.736)
for the for the downside or for the upside here?

Craig (05:57.943)
Yeah, if like if that gives way in the days ahead, what level is that?

Chris Vermeulen (06:01.737)
Yep. Well this this level here to the downside will be three thousand six hundred.

Craig (06:05.974)
No, no, no. The one that if the the the six one eight level, if that if the six one eight giv level gives way, what is that six one eight level?

Chris Vermeulen (06:11.035)
yeah, sorry, that that's about forty one hundred. It's right where gold is trading right now, four thousand forty one hundred. And so it's just kind of flirting around this orange line. If I zoom in, you can see it a little bit more. It's tagged this level, bounced off it, and so this is that level, and it's it's kind of already below it and losing traction. It's sl it's kind of slipping. So I think this is a amazing opportunity. And you know, I think you need to have

Craig (06:16.097)
Okay.

Craig (06:21.026)
Mm-hmm.

Craig (06:29.123)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (06:36.268)
have sprott on speed dial so that you can pick up some metals if we get this very sharp dip.

Craig (06:42.306)
What Chris, what if on the flip side, that six one eight level holds and that this recent dip from forty four hundred down to whatever the lows were back on Monday evening, thirty nine fifty six or something like that, what would you be watching for in a recovery to go, okay, maybe the worst is over?

Chris Vermeulen (07:04.219)
yeah, well, what I would look for would be like a what I call an impulse move. So what we want to see from a technical standpoint is we want to see price have very strong momentum. And so if we look at the these previous highs, so we've got a previous high over here, we've got another previous high over here. Now, an impulse move means we've the market has a strong move, an impulse move. It's busted through two resistance levels. When you break through two ceilings,

Craig (07:16.622)
Mm-hmm.

Craig (07:23.148)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (07:32.938)
That first pause and pullback is usually an opportunity to get in before it starts the next big run. And then, you know, it'll it'll rinse and repeat through these bull flag usually patterns. So that's what I'd be looking for. And gold, I mean, it's a long ways up. Right now it's at 4,000, right? It would need to really get to about 4,600 to break out and then a pause from there. And that'll say, hey, the momentum has shifted from a downtrend, which is lower highs and lower lows, to now it has made it's

Craig (07:42.274)
Yeah.

Craig (07:46.755)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (08:01.343)
Broken a bunch of highs. It has a higher high. And now we're looking forward to create like a higher low, right? And when it starts to turn up and break out, you could be like, okay, this train is leaving the station. And the next move is going to be sub significantly higher. And, you know, we can get a gauge of where that is if we look at the weekly chart. And we go back to the previous kind of major, major lows here for gold. We'll we'll kind of go right back to here the 20

14 lows. We can get right here, 2015 lows. We can get a gauge based on if silver or gold is to find traction right here. This huge super cycle and the blow off phase and this correction down is saying that if if it hooks up and starts to move higher, we're looking at about eighty five, eighty five hundred for gold. So I mean that's a pretty nice double from kind of where it is right now. So there's a lot of upside. And and so that's what's really exciting. And

Craig (08:55.438)
Yeah, over next years. Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (08:59.839)
obviously if gold pulls back lower, if it does pull back to that Fibonacci level, it lowers the target as well. So if we go to thirty six hundred, gold still would move to about eighty one hundred, which is obviously still a very significant move. In fact, if we move these levels down, it actually is provides more opportunity, about thirty percent more potential if it goes down to that level.

Craig (09:11.33)
Mm-hmm.

Craig (09:20.419)
Mm-hmm.

You I'd point out to people that eight thousand. Well, you know, over the last ten years gold's gone from eleven hundred to two thousand to five thousand. and the debt keeps increasing and the money supply keeps increasing. So why in another five years wouldn't it go to eight thousand? so anyway, Chris, I back to your charts, however. I think that's extremely helpful. I mean, we wanna really keep an if we start watching out below four thousand, that gives you some idea of w what might be coming.

Let's do the same exercise with silver. there are some old highs after we first broke through fifty from November and October of last year at around fifty-four. I mean, we're trying to find some support near there. What you see?

Chris Vermeulen (10:06.783)
Yeah, so silver has has similar type of price action. And this is act this actually goes silver, platinum, and palladium actually all have very similar chart patterns. They're they're really trying to cling on to this kind of significant. There's a little breakout level, support, support, support. And it's kind of broken down and has a little bit of a bearish pattern. So silver is already kind of giving way along with platinum and palladium. And and I do think we are going to see metals have one more push down. And I think it's going to be fairly violent.

Craig (10:25.144)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (10:36.521)
When we look at silver using Fibonacci, we have the initial leg down and we've got this bounce. And it is pointing to still a very sharp drop for silver, right? It is pointing to about $40 per ounce. And and that's why I'm excited because I love silver in that way, because it is extremely volatile. And when you have, if we have this just the way these charts are are are unfolding, I feel like we're going to see some event and there's going to be margin calls and we're going to have very sharp drop. I love it if we can get.

Silver down to these levels, it'll be like back the truck up because it'll be a very short-lived window. It may only tag 40 for minutes or maybe even hours and rebound, right? That's what this chart is kind of pointing to. It's going to be a couple big red bars, and then it's probably going to bounce right back up into the 60 range. So this is what I'm keeping my eyes on for. It's a very short-term opportunity to pick it up at a killer deal. And it would, it would, it would dip below that 50 level. I think there'll be a lot of margin calls in the silver space.

And it could be an opportunity.

Craig (11:36.493)
Yeah. Yeah, I wonder, you know, some global equity washout or, you know, something that just everything gets thrown out. You certainly see that as a possibility. And again, very helpful chart. I we don't usually talk about Bitcoin, but why the heck not? today I I find it interesting that let's see, Bitcoin got to about a hundred and twenty thousand and now it's down to

Chris Vermeulen (11:51.785)
Mm.

Craig (12:00.738)
55,000 or whatever. And it's a lot, it's like a couple of zeros on top of silver, which went to 120 and now it's down to 55. not identical charts, but hey, just for fun, what do you see there?

Chris Vermeulen (12:07.647)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (12:11.999)
Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin is is clearly in a downtrend. The long-term moving average, like the hundred and fifty days, sloping down. All the other moving averages are sloping down. It is in a bear market, right? So we've seen that we've just seen this for quite some time. And the charts don't look the greatest. Just based on there's a few different levels we can look at, just based on this drop and this rebound using Fibonacci. It's saying, hey, we should see it. Let's grab a pen here. We've got the initial drop. We've got the bounce.

Based on that, we should see it come to the 618. And if it finds support and bounces, we should see it drop to the 100% measured move, which if we look at that is about $45,000 per Bitcoin. Yeah, it's it's a it's a 20% haircut, right? 20 plus percent haircut. and so we're we're on the cusp of that. Like, you know, it actually looks like a pretty straightforward downward trend. It's a bear market.

Craig (12:53.55)
Just like silver again.

Chris Vermeulen (13:08.455)
It's bouncing on Fibonacci levels. It's starting to give way today. It's in fact Bitcoin's down like 3.6% today. And everything else is kind of positive. There's just there is no love in the Bitcoin space. There everybody's moving to DRAM, ETF, and Micron. And they all want all the other stuff. And all this provides opportunity. I mean, you could potentially bet against Bitcoin falling pricing here. And I mean, that's the odds are it's going lower at this point.

Craig (13:19.746)
Yeah.

Craig (13:35.503)
Well, and back in the day that used to kind of be correlated with the NASDAQ. It's not anymore, it seems. but in in line with the earlier discussion, what could cause a global margin call and wipe out, you know, would be some straight down move in the equity markets caused by woo some unforeseen event. so let's wrap up with that. Chris, pick whichever you want to use, the Qs or the you know, for the Nasdaq or a or S P E T F or something. What do you see?

Chris Vermeulen (13:40.979)
Yeah, it's disconnected for sure.

Chris Vermeulen (13:53.771)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (14:03.103)
Sure, I'll pull the QQQ, yeah. So the the QQQ, and this is the same with the S P 500. We, this type of volatility in the market internals that we have of money flowing and money's rotating between mega caps one day and then microcaps the next day. They're going to risk on small caps and technology and all that stuff one day. And the next day they're going into dividend stocks and utilities. We're seeing, we're seeing just money slosh back and forth.

And we're seeing that in the volatility. We're seeing that here. It's actually very similar. This box right here is the same type of of what we saw over here. So the big question for the stock market right now is like, is the market stalling out and has it kind of lost its mojo for a while? Or is this a pause and we're going to see it pop and and have another huge euphoric move up? The Nasdaq, the QQQ.

Is actually pointing to about a 20% move if it resolves to the upside. So we got this rally up, we got this pullback, and it is showing us that we could see the Qs rally up to about $879 per ounce, which is about a 20% move. So there is potential for us to see one more AI small cap euphoric pop and rally in the stock market. And it's on the cusp of that.

The flip side of that is the market really doesn't know what it wants to do. It actually has mixed signals. And is it going to break down and sell off, or is it going to stall out over time like it did over here? Like we saw we saw the market trade sideways for months. I mean, it went sideways for like kind of like four or five months very easily and then kind of lost, lost some of its traction and had a reset. So that's that's kind of where we're at. We have we liquidated our SP 500 and our QQQ positions.

Craig (15:36.803)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (15:53.088)
We have stepped aside because right now the market doesn't know where it wants to go. If we look at it from like a trending perspective, like the S P 500, the right-hand side chart is kind of the lens and the health of what we we look at in the market. So it starts to become very ugly, unhealthy, and it's it starts to bleed out. And that's when we have these trend reversals on our on the left chart, which is our our trend signal. The market has been giving choppy signals. We we pulled off some profits near the peak and we scaled out as it moved up.

And now we're just waiting. We're like, when is it? Is it going to give us a new buy signal for a leg up or is it going to roll over? And when we look at the right side here, we got orange bars. This is telling us the market is weak. It's it's kind of sick. And it doesn't mean it's going to go down. It just means it's it's digesting the recent move. There's waves of profit taking. We keep seeing even on the intraday charts. I think we see this if we go to the the the futures and look at the 10-minute chart. Take a look at the QQQ and what's been happening on the major

Craig (16:23.874)
Yeah.

Craig (16:31.758)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (16:52.265)
major index here, we we have seen some huge bouts. The market opens up and we see just a huge drop with massive volume. And we keep seeing these like big bouts of selling at the close or right at the open. Huge, huge volume. And then the market is very resilient right now. Every dip is people are just piling back in and they and they drive it back up. So there is distribution selling. There is big money rotating out of this market, but it's just

Craig (17:11.662)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Vermeulen (17:20.095)
P there's enough people in there just gobbling it right back up, saying, Hey, it's a dip, I'm getting in. So the market's strong because of that. You know, it's very resilient at this phase. So that's about it.

Craig (17:23.917)
Yeah.

Craig (17:31.064)
You wanna do one of those Fibonacci deals on the on the QQQs just for for the sake of something to watch?

Chris Vermeulen (17:40.347)
Yeah, I mean the the key the key level here I as I pointed out it looks like we've got about a twenty percent upside. So we're looking for or this this is the this is the Nasdaq. Let me just go the QQ Q because that's what most people trade here. If we go here pardon?

Craig (17:53.935)
But yeah, if it were to roll over too, Chris. If it were to roll over, what would the downside be on a Fibonacci?

Chris Vermeulen (18:00.935)
Yeah, so that yeah, good point. So I think right here, if the market starts to break these highs, if it starts obviously starts to break to new highs, obviously there's no overhead resistance. The market has reset, it's starting to go higher, and you should be looking for, you know, eight seventy nine. If on the flip side, if it starts to break down through these levels, if it starts to break down below these levels here, we can use a Fibonacci retracement. And this is saying based on the strength of this rally, it's gonna say, well,

The market is going to want to pull back into these sweet spots. The sweet spot is typically the 38 to 50% retracement of that move, which I mean really isn't all that far down. It's about a seven to 10% move to the downside. the big question is: is it just a a small healthy correction, or you know, is it something deeper that actually creates a big sell-off?

But overall, that's kind of the downside potential. If it comes down into this lower zone around 650, 675, if it builds a little bottom there and starts to turn back up, I mean the market is most likely gonna work its way up and head up into the mid 800s again. So I think the key thresholds is is it gonna break to new highs? If so, it's got a lot of upside potential. If it breaks these lows that we've seen from a a few weeks ago, then look for it to pull back.

Again, we're still in an overall bull market. And so a lot of people say, like, if it starts to break down, I'm gonna buy an inverse ETF. The problem is there's very in most cases, there's very little downside, you know, four or five percent downside with an inverse ETF. In a bull market, those downside moves happen usually in a day or two, that that drop, and then it just turns around and starts to go higher. So it's always best to go and look at the long-term picture. This is the weekly chart of the S P 500.

We want to know, like, hey, when we start in a new bull market, you know, overall you don't want to be shorting the market. There are these little resets along the way, but we are still in a bull market phase. So don't if anybody's looking to try and short a pullback, I wouldn't be shorting it. I would be waiting for it to find a bottom, turnaround, and then when it starts to move higher, you jump back in for the next leg up. I think a big problem is trying to profit from falling markets when we're in an an underlying bull market is a very difficult trade and it's

Craig (20:13.006)
Yeah.

Chris Vermeulen (20:21.109)
Just a lot of wasted time and and energy.

Craig (20:23.394)
Yeah. Yeah, especially like, you know, we were talking earlier. Money supply keeps growing. that money goes someplace. That stock market just keeps on chugging higher. It'll help the metals at some point too, for sure. Chris, thank you. It's always fascinating to visit with you. And this this episode particularly helpful as we enter a a pretty volatile month of July. So thanks for all your help.

Chris Vermeulen (20:45.929)
Yeah, you're welcome. Anytime.

Craig (20:47.853)
And from all of us, Sprott Money SprottMoney.com, thanks for your time for watching. But keep an eye on this channel. Month of July is going to be pretty busy at Sprott Money. Lots good content to come. Hit the like or the subscribe button so you don't miss any of it. And we'll look forward to visiting with you again sometime soon. But for now, we'll sign off. Thanks for watching. And more to come as the month of July begins to unfold.